So often, society looks at murderers, high-level drug dealers and other felons and asks one question: “Why didn’t someone do something?”

Many of these people started their lives of crime as teenagers or even younger children. Maybe if someone had set them on the right path early on, many observers surmise, they would not have ended up this way.

The Western Tidewater Regional Jail has a program to help accomplish just that. The “Straight Talk” program has been going on for about 15 years.

Several jail officers give up half of their Saturdays to run the program. Parents sign their children up for the Straight Talk program if they feel it would help them straighten up their act.

The teens get almost the full jail treatment — handcuffs, leg shackles, jumpsuit wardrobes and jail officers ordering them around for their every move. Inmates yell and threaten when they see the newbies enter their cell block — although the teens never get released into the general population.

The teens come face to face with inmates, with only a few metal bars separating them. The inmates make all sorts of insinuations about some of the harshest realities of life inside the jail walls — realities the teens surely never want to confront.

The teens also sit in a classroom and have inmates come talk to them. In a “Beyond Scared Straight” show that aired on A&E on Thursday, one Western Tidewater Regional Jail inmate told the teens that she celebrated her birthday sitting on her cot crying, without so much as a birthday cake.

“It’s an amazing, effective, powerful program,” Arnold Shapiro, producer and creator of the documentary series, told me when I called him about the episode.

“Our methods are to get their attention, to break them down, then we build them back up,” said Capt. James Lewis, one of the jail officers runnning the program. “We want them to see what’s real. It might sink in, so they won’t wind up coming back in here.”

Prevention is the whole key to the Straight Talk program — prevention, that is, of a further life of crime.

But there’s one thought I can’t shake when thinking about this program — that it would never be needed if parents were doing their job disciplining their children. An angry mother and father should be the biggest “scared straight” program any teen could need.

However, since we all know that’s not the reality we live in today, we all owe the officers at the jail a debt of gratitude for volunteering their time to run the program. It has surely set many teens straight.